The Pinball Diaries

After thinking about it for a bit I decided to try a different approach with the G.I. wiring. First I mapped out where the wiring needed to go on the new playfield with a black marker, using the old playfield as a guide. Like so:

Then I made a second pass, stapling down wire as I fed it directly off the spool. When I reached a lamp socket I cut the wire and stripped off about an inch, and then started laying down another piece to travel to the next socket.

Then, I made a third pass, mounting and soldering all the lamp sockets, including the pop bumper lamps. Here it is with the G.I. almost all done (plus some lamp circuit boards and miscellaneous parts that were trivial to transfer):

I started replicating the wiring on the new playfield. This was not very much fun: hunching over the playfield measuring out a piece of wire, stripping both ends, stapling it to the playfield, and then soldering. I got about this far and then decided to try and figure out a better way to do it.

The next step on the new playfield: putting down all of the G.I. wiring. Not looking forward to this because the wiring is stapled, without insulation, directly onto the playfield. In addition, the lamp sockets aren’t really mounted, they’re just soldered directly to the bare wire. Blech, messy.

Here’s another not-so-great photo showing the G.I. wiring stapled to the playfield. Williams must have saved a few bucks doing the wiring like this.

Time to start work on the new playfield. First step: hammering in nice shiny new T-Nuts in all the spots the old playfield had ‘em.

Next step was to remove the old playfield from the cabinet to start transfering things to the new one. A little nervous about this step. Big catastrophe potential.

It actually turned out to be not so bad. I marked all the connectors in the backbox so I’d know where to hook ‘em up again, disconnected them, and then just lifted the thing out. Here you can see the old and the new side by side. If you click to enlarge the picture you can see all the shiny new T-Nuts in the new playfield.

The cabinet, sans playfield:

In my spare time over the last week and a half I managed to removed most of the pieces from the top of the playfield. Knowing I was going to have to put all these pieces back in a month or two after I’d forgotten where they went, I took picture of each piece as I took it off, stuck it (and any related screws) in a Ziplock bag with a numbered Post-It, and then wrote down the number and the name of the piece. As you might imagine, this was very tedious.

After sitting in the corner of a pinball machine for 14 years, light bulbs can get pretty dirty. These were under the spin-out ramp:

Roughly 70 ziplock bags later the playfield surface was almost totally clear. There were a few posts where the screws had basically bonded to the T-Nuts under the playfield and the only way to get ‘em out was to destroy either the screw or the T-Nut or both. Pain in the butt.

As well as upper surface playfield parts, I removed the major mechanical components from the underside of the playfied. Here’s a shot of the underside with most of them removed (as well as the big center lamp circuit board). One nice thing about this was that it made the playfield significantly lighter when I removed it from the cabinet.

Here’s the new playfield. It’s got the artwork, the dimples, the big mounting bracket T-Nuts, and that’s it.

Since it was gonna be a while before I was ready for the new playfield (like a couple weeks), I layed it on the floor and piled a bunch of other playfields on top of it to make sure it was nice and flat. Whether this had any effect whatsoever I have no idea. The observant among you will notice that is a CFTBL playfield on top (face down).

Alright. A little help from the wife and Taxi is on its feet. Way way in the back of this photo are Indiana Jones and Theatre of Magic.

I probably took about a hundred pictures of the old playfield in the machine from all sorts of angles and distances, but none of them really conveyed the overall grotesqueness of its condition. Suffice it to say that I think this machine was in a popular arcade at some point in its life and it shows. Cracked ramps, scratches all over, and artwork that is really decayed.

Here it is, ready to have the top surface disassembled:

I decided it was time to take on yet another project and set about replacing the horrible playfield on my Taxi machine with a NOS one that I found on Ebay a few years ago. A perfect opportunity to take lots of pictures and put ‘em up on the web with the delusion that somebody cares.

Here’s Taxi in my basement behind a whole crap-load of miscellaneous junk. First step, clean up miscellaneous junk so I can actually get to the machine. That’s my Banzai Run on the left. BANZAI!!!!

Well, that wasn’t so bad. You can sorta see Hurricane there behind Taxi in this pic. I think the last time I rode that bike was in 1996.